Mexico remains without an elected president. In the last
few days a number of problems have surfaced in the election.

My friend Raymond first ran some basic integrity
checks on the published results. The idea was to add the
number of votes on each booth (valid and invalid) and counting
whether they matched the number of votes that could be issued.

Raymond at lunch last week.

He found that the results did not match. This is bad
either because someone cheated, or because the nation, as a
whole can not count. There are arithmetic errors of this kind
in nearly half the voting booths in the country.

The tampering, we believe, happens when the votes
registered on the official documents (Actas) does not match
the votes that were counted at the particular voting booth.

Now, without being a witness to the actual recounts, there
are a number of statistical anomalies that can pinpoint the
tampering.

Update: Am removing this data, as it seems incorrect
(the over-participation), see the next web page for the
details.

The following graph plots in the x axis the number of votes
cast in a voting location. The y axis plots the number of
booths that got that results for a given party. I have
smoothed out the results, grouping 10 votes per tick. Here
are the results for Mexico City:

Each colored line represent the votes cast for each party.
These curves are normal
distribution for the population that cast its votes. This
pattern repeats itself in the cities or place where the
competition was well monitored.

But plotting some of the contested states, the troublesome
states, we find that some cheating took place. Not visible to
the naked eye, but visible to SQL, awk, a Perl script and
Gnuplot:

This is the state of Durango. The cheating is very
obvious, a number of votes were artificially deflated or
nulled. This is why the red line, representing the PRD,
presents this incredible behavior for the normal distribution.

In the 1988 election, instead of deflating votes, they
inflated votes, so the normal distribution was basically a
mirror of this one (but for the wining party).

The problem with these curves is that without opening the
electoral packages it is not possible to determine the actual
numer of votes cast. We only know that tampering took place,
but the real results could alter the curves significantly.

The results of these graphs are backed up by actual
accounts of opened packages. Whenever packages are being
randomly opened in these districts, votes that had gone
missing for the PRD are showing up. 4,000 here, 20,000 there
and all of a sudden the 250,000 vote difference (the 0.5%
difference) between the candidates starts to shrink.

The opening of the packages and the events in the last week
reported on the press (illegal opening of the voting packages
(there is no mandate yet to packages yet), election materials
found on the trashcan) has confirmed what can be identified
with a few SQL commands. These have been documented
elsewhere.

Now, tampering is not only hurting one party, its hurting
all of them. So without a centralized and monitored recount
it will be hard to determine the results of the election.

The web site here is a wiki
with a few other studies (in Spanish) on the official
results. Full graphs (smoothened and unsmoothened, plus the
data to plot them are available here

Law violations

In addition to the tampering with the results, there are a
few contested bits as well. For one, president Fox was barred
from helping out the candidate from his party (mexican law
requirement), but its a requirement that he ignored and kept
using his platform as a president to push for him.

A number of ghost ads were run on the "quiet" period before
the election by phantom organizations to instill fear in the
population. Which had the effect that I have documented in a
previous blog entry.

Although the smear campaign was eventually determined to
have been illegal, it was too little too late. By the time the
courts ruled against it on the grounds of illegality, the ads
had aired for five weeks in a row. And they were quickly
replaced with new smear ads that had to go through the same
court process before they could be taken off the streets.